What’s cheap in the city this week? A little bit of everything! Whether you’re looking for classical theatre in a bucolic setting, or something challenging and experimental, we’ve got you covered. Get ready for Pride at Buddies, get a new perspective on love at Videofag, or get your hands dirty at the Theatre Centre: the choice is yours! Continue reading Cheap Theatre in Toronto for the week of June 11th, 2013
All posts by Mike Anderson
Eye-Catching Toronto Theatre for the Week of June 10th, 2013
Here is what’s going on in Toronto theatre this week. There are several great shows to catch for the week of June 3rd, 2013. ** Shows marked with the double asterisks and in red are the ones that make Wayne, our Managing Editor, wish he could exist in multiple parallel universes so he could check them all out.
Continue reading Eye-Catching Toronto Theatre for the Week of June 10th, 2013
Review: The Adam Growe Quiz Show (Adam Growe)
A solid comedy quiz show presented by Adam Growe at the Randolph Theatre in Toronto
If The Adam Growe Quiz Show (which played the Randolph last night) were organized by anyone else, it would be dreadful. You can only stuff so many things into a playbill before it collapses under its own weight, and the night’s programme includes music, stand-up, trivia, stand-up, variety, stand-up, and cash prizes, interspersed with more stand-up. It sounds exhausting, and I wasn’t expecting much as I wandered in.
How silly of me. It was incredible.
Continue reading Review: The Adam Growe Quiz Show (Adam Growe)
Review: Geekprov / Improv Against Humanity (The 404s)
Toronto improv group The 404s get their geek on at Comedy Bar
Improv Against Humanity (presented at the Comedy Bar) is a fantastic idea. The 404s are one of Toronto’s best-kept comedy secrets, bringing improvisational comedy with a geeky bent to conventions, conferences and clubs all over North America, while Cards Against Humanity–the source material for tonight’s improv set–has been a runaway success fuelled entirely by laugh-out-loud hilarity and poor life choices.
It’s always a good sign when a comedy troupe has enough fans to fill a room to capacity: the 404s have earned their success through over a decade of consistent, careful work, and their fans didn’t leave disappointed.
But I’m afraid to say that I did.
Continue reading Review: Geekprov / Improv Against Humanity (The 404s)
Review: KAMP (Hotel Modern)
Hotel Modern’s KAMP is one of the most worthwhile pieces of Toronto theatre you’ll see this year
While KAMP (playing at Harbourfront’s Enwave Theatre) is described as a puppet show, I found the effect more like watching a group of children playing in a schoolyard. One of them leads the model train into the station; another unloads the passengers. And in a dollhouse just inches away, the third is collecting the shoes, clothes and eyeglasses abandoned in the anteroom of a gas chamber, the better to process the next batch of prisoners.
KAMP tells the story of a sunrise-to-sunset day in Auschwitz, one of the Nazi extermination camps. Three performers move among thousands of intricate, eight-centimetre puppets, telling the story in short, unspoken vignettes. And through clever use of tiny cameras, their pictures projected above the landscape as a sort of sky, the audience grasps the true, ground-level scale of what is unfolding.
From the theatre’s balcony, these tiny puppets look like exactly what they are: wire puppets attached to boards. But from ten centimetres off the ground, the camera lingering over every face in this enormous crowd, they look eerily, undeniably human.